One of the trickier skills to learn is how to recenter and return to your power even when you have to take a step back or give up on a battle. It’s important to ground yourself again and keep your energy forward even when stepping backwards. Remember that losing ground is not always defeat, rather it’s giving up your disadvantaged position so that you can find the advantage again.

This is a martial take on what need not be so dramatic, but it’s the energy I’m feeling today. Don’t be so precious about the way you decided to do things and keep recentering on what you are trying to accomplish, and be open to many paths toward that end.

Creatures of prey have their protections against predation, ways they can harm what is trying to hurt them, just as big predators have their weapons of aggression that could turn agains those who would hunt them. Hunting is more of a voluntary activity for many humans these days, and it is one of the fundamental relationships from which civilization emerged. There is no helpless prey that lacks some skill, some poison or venom, some shell to give itself a chance for success against those who would consume it. And if you would survive as a predator, your work is to overcome those obstacles and destroy them.

I find myself curious as to why this message comes to me today, other than noting that Mars is in Leo and evokes the archetype of the lion and the big game hunter who goes after lions for ego rather than nourishment. As I sit with this, I remember that all of us have power, even those we’d claim are marginalized, voiceless, or powerless. Putting those words upon a people or population is in its own way an effort to defang them, to make them pathetic, but it is usually an error. All beings have a measure of power, and it is a mistake to think they could be easily hunted and defeated.

Scales are a tool of measurement that have also taken on the symbolism of justice and truth. They keep us honest, so that if we offer an ounce of gold, the scale will validate that. Balance is fairness and truth.

Within us, the heart weighs its own truth against what is happening. We feel if a relationship is too much taking or giving. We feel guilt when we aren’t doing enough. We feel resentment when we’re doing too much.

We can refine this power of the heart to help us make good decisions for ourselves without the extremes of suffering. Just check in to feel how the balance lands with you, and make adjustments until it is true. Remember that this balance changes daily. An agreement that felt fair yesterday may no longer be fair today because things have changed—you’ve learned new things about the situation, or you’re no longer able to hold your side of it, or you just need a day off.

Let the heart be your scales and your guide.

Lately I’ve been thinking of getting a new dog. As much as I miss having one around the house, the conversations remind me that dogs require work and tending. They usually don’t show up fully trained, and in the puppy stage there’s a lot you need to invest so that some day you can enjoy a trained, companionable pet. And even then you can’t predict what will happen, how long they’ll live.

To live without love is a horror that turns men into monsters. Gender specified intentionally. But truly loving is scary because it requires we take the longer perspective and that we set aside momentary frustrations for the health of the relationship. This investment yields so much more than it takes from us, at its best, but we also know relationships end for many reasons and can bring harm.

So today we are invited to be deliberate about where we invest our love, but still, invest. Extend yourself for someone else. Be willing to try to work things out instead of dismissing them entirely. Yet know your value and your limits. It is a dance of paradoxes.

The prevailing urge seems to be to harden around one’s perspective and ideology, to make it bigger and more grandiose, to become even more dismissive of opposition and discourse—but we are in a time when following that urge is likely to draw even more opposition, even more discourse, bigger obstacles that point out the flaws in our reasoning and the lapses in our factual assessment of what is happening.

Mercury and Jupiter remain at an opposition to each other while Mercury slows down and prepares to retrograde. Both are in signs of personal struggle, yet each is in the other’s sign of rulership. So they can help each other succeed or they can bicker and encourage each other to fail and flail.

As frustrating as it is, it feels like the move right now is to move toward more engagement, more conversation, more speaking what is true for you and also listening to what is true for the other person with the same attention and curiosity you’d like them to offer you. Yet it is also a good time to feel out where attention and curiosity feel possible and fruitful, and where bringing those energies would actually defeat and diminish you. Not all conversations are safe, and not all people are willing or able to listen.

Mars, the spirit of war and will, has left the realm of securing the home and now moves into a territory far more bombastic and proud, willing to make dramatic pronouncements and stir up shit for its cause.

Personally, I find righteousness increasingly repugnant and unhelpful for any kind of relationship. Today, however, what feels like the teaching that’s being offered is how important it is to stand proudly for whatever cause or people are yours. There is a way in which we aspire to have objective morals and laws, and there is a way in which our morality begins with whom we are aligned with, whom we identify with. We’re more likely to overlook the criminal elements of our home team, for example, and to highlight the criminality of our adversaries.

This message to me feels quite dramatic, as is Leo’s purview, but at its heart it speaks to me of being for yourself, being for your people. Even in conflict, each party in a conflict has its own interests and values that must meet and clash so that a true harmony can arise. When someone is pretending to care, or hiding their true values, then any agreement will be incomplete and prone to disruption down the line.

So the positive power of this message, to burn with righteousness, feels like a willingness to glow with the love and passion of your cause. May we hold that power without the shadow of dehumanizing and degrading our adversaries.

Today the moon in Cancer opposes Venus in Capricorn, suggesting that our longing for nurturance and safety and a place to be our deepest selves feels somewhat in conflict with the desire to draw toward ourselves the resources and power we need to create grand works of beauty and love. Yet these are also compliments in opposition. The moon is in her realm here, so close to our bodies and feelings, calling us to bring sweetness to ourselves and those closest to us. We can hold the both, anchoring in what makes us feel the most at home in our lives while opening up to those who might see us and be drawn toward us for collaboration.

In practical terms, it feels right to spend a little extra time today to be cozy, to be sweet to you and those with whom you share your home—whatever home is for you.

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The past couple years have featured a collective purging of unworkable habits around people-pleasing and diplomacy that doesn’t include one’s own needs, along with an embrace of increasing self-assertion and instinctive willfulness that creates more space for one’s self. Today that dialectic wants to be grounded in a love that is bigger than the personal self, in a drive toward beauty that is ambitious and grand, that remembers the past and holds a future aspiration.

What will you invest into yourself and your life to move you toward greatness? What does greatness mean to you, personally, in your own life? It’s a word that’s loaded up with its own toxicity when it’s attached to ideas of status and fame that really don’t matter to you. If you could set those ideas aside and sit with the question, what would make my life truly great? What would I need to acquire, to learn, to unlearn, to let go of that would increase what is great within my life, my relationships, my family, my community?

When you know your worth, you know where your value serves and where it does not. You don’t need to be all things for all people. You simply are the best of yourself and find the people and situations that value what is best of you, and find the people and situations that can help you with things that aren’t your best. Spending time knowing yourself in this way gives direction to that energy of self-assertion that might otherwise be too impulsive, too distractible, too lacking in a plan. It harnesses that energy toward your own purpose.

A lesson that I’ve been slow to learn in life is that people don’t always mean the things they say—or they might mean them in the moment, but then immediately forget they said it, or change their mind. Also confusing is that sometimes people speak using words that sound really aggressive or dramatic, and they don’t mean the literal interpretation of their words, rather they are using a dramatic expression to convey the intensity of feeling they’re feeling.

Regardless of what a person says, what they do tells us more about them. I am reminded of that story from The Princess Bride in which the Dread Pirate Roberts tells his captive, every night, “Goodnight, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” This is probably really scary the first dozen times, but eventually one stops believing the threat. After hundreds of mornings not being killed, the threat stops seeming like a literal threat. The behavior says, I value you, I am keeping you around.

Another measure is the effects of the behavior. If someone says they love you but their behavior consistently leaves you feeling abused, neglected, or diminished—well, it doesn’t matter what they say. It doesn’t matter why they’re acting the way they’re acting. What matters is that you are not experiencing being loved in this relationship, and if the other person truly values you, you need to work together to change that. And if they are unwilling to work with you, then you’re likely better served looking for a relationship in which you experience love.

With Jupiter in Gemini the tendency to make big pronouncements, empty promises, and ambiguous but scary threats would be pronounced. To listen to those as the earnest truth, or to dismiss them as inconsequential ramblings, neither seem like workable paths forward. But if we can, we can try to be rocks in the river, deeply grounded and letting the flood of words pass over and around us. In this grounded state, not clinging to the words, we have an easier vantage to watch what is really happening.